The Echo Turns 2 Years Today

 By Ebrima G. Sankareh, Founder & Editor-In-Chief

Certainly, “the only thing that does not change is change itself” as long noted by linguists, precisely because change is change. Given the rapidity with which things happen these days, it is sometimes very difficult to realize that time and tide wait for no man and as we observe, not celebrate two years of cyber journalism, we are all too conscious of this time element vis-à-vis the transient developments in The Gambia.

Fundamentally, The Echo was launched to among other things, inform, educate and where possible, entertain readers and to specifically, help in exposing the atrocious human rights violation in the West African state of The Gambia where, ever since the coming into force of the military junta on July, 22, 1994, humanity has, bluntly put, ceased to exist. What we have in Jammeh’s Gambia is a menacing façade that buries its head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich that continuously feigns ignorance of the prevailing realities.

As long predicted in a speech I gave to Sixth Formers at my beautiful Alma Mater- Saint Augustine’s High School on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1995, the Jammeh regime has now methestasized to a full bloom Kakistocracy gagging press houses, burning down media houses, killing journalists, torturing journalists and their agents, executing political enemies, real or imagined and today, the situation more than anything else, portends cataclysmic gloom in a mini-state once characterized as an oasis of democracy, tolerance, human rights and all their attendant advantages. That was yesterday and this now and the situation is so scary that I sometimes pose these rhetorical questions; is this The Gambia I was born in? What went wrong? Do we really deserve this monstrous regime headed by a monstrous murderer masquerading as a Moses? What has happened to all of the good people that I admired growing up in The Gambia? Where are they?

Judging from the news coverage for the past two years, it is all too apparent that most of those good people have either disappeared for their lives or joined the regime at the expense of the entire population, sometimes, to presumably save their own lives. Some are at Mile Two Prisons, a concentration camp that has become the most powerful metaphor of Yahya Jammeh’s harrowing authoritarianism. Evidently, no one, no matter how powerful (both physically and mentally), returns from Mile II the same.

I vividly remember my colleague Mathew K. Jallow’s own Mile II experiences. Jallow who out of a curiosity to see what really obtains behind the granite walls, once deliberately had a brush with the domestic courts and after his sentence in the early 1990s in an eye-catching prison dairy captioned “To Hell and Back, Life in Mile II Prisons” he chronicled the grave living conditions that he as a prisoner had to endure. In those days, torture was almost anathema to Gambian prison life, but the food and general sanitary conditions were in Jallow’s powerful memoirs, “dehumanizing.” Although a very brave person and a phenomenal adventurer, I wonder if Jallow would ever defy physics and try Mile II under Yahya Jammeh’s rule? What kind of tale will Mathew a master storyteller write for us if he were ever to see the light of day again? That deep suspicion about Mathew’s tenacity to venture encapsulates the utterly criminal character of the Yahya Jammeh regime; a regime that brags about sending citizens to Mile II only to vegetate behind bars. A regime that peddles cock and bull stories about alleged prison escapes when in actuality, the escapees are murdered in cold blood by rogues in the service of Yahya Jammeh an all–knowing herbalist-cum-Islamic scholar who can barely recite a verse from the holy Quran. The most perplexing paradox of the whole Yahya Jammeh intellectual bravado is why he continues to send his wife to deliver in the United States if he were the super duper Medicine man that he claims? Herein lies the cruelest hoax of this monstrous kleptocratic maniac who has stolen our resources that he is probably, the richest Gambian today.

Therefore, as we observe our two years of cyber journalism, we reflect on the hurdles that Yahya Jammeh’s regime continues to pose to journalists, human rights workers, politicians and ordinary Gambian citizens. Our colleague Chief Ebrima Manneh remains in incommunicado detention for close to two years now. The international community and all press watch dogs have either petitioned or protested but the dictator does not just care. Just last week, the Community Court of the Economic Community of West African States-ECOWAS ordered that Manneh be released and be compensated in damages to the tune of $100,000. It remains to be seen whether Jammeh will ever act magnanimous to the verdict of a Court that his nation is a signatory to.

Our other colleague Fatou Manneh has been waiting for over a year after she was arrested by the predacious National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and charged with insulting Yahya Jammeh, himself a retromingent rascal that insults the entire nation on a daily basis. Beneath the façade of Fatou’s arrest and protracted libel trial in a judicial system that has long ran amok is the rude reality of Yahya Jammeh’s childish demeanor-the boy cannot just grow!